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My InfoBarrel Residual Income Report - March 2011

That was pretty awful and it really ate into my productivity during a lot of the month although recently I’ve been getting back to work even though I can’t barely get out of bed. Talk about residual income, I continued to make money here on IB during my 2-week hiatus here on IB when I couldn’t focus or work much at all.

Funny month to take a personal hit too because so many people suffered through the “Panda Update’ which I referred to as the “Farmer’s Update” back in my last Income Report. After many people had problems with February a lot of people had trouble with March too but I continued to see improvement month over month with Adsense (albeit small) and a slight decline in other residuals despite it all.

Outside of my slowed work pace during the middle of the month I focused here on InfoBarrel and get myself into the 85 percent earnings tier by getting to 31 points for the month. Most of my publications this month went to two projects, the promotion of my new website on Diabetic Shoe Information and my older articles on travel mugs which is the basis of my Making Money On InfoBarrel with Amazon case study.

If you recall in my last report on my travel mug project my main travel mug article made roughly $45 over the course of February on Amazon alone. I was promoting it with backlinks heavily through guestposting on PostRunner predominantly but by early March the article fell out of the primary index and is now in the supplemental index – in search it can’t be found without searching for it and adding “infobarrel” to the end of the search string. This is annoying because the article now only gets referral traffic rather than organic search traffic so its earnings have dropped quite a bit.

Even still that article has made $14.65 via Amazon this month with even more coming from Adsense and Chitika. My other supporting articles have also made some money so the entire project us still doing well despite my main article’s rankings; I just look forward to the main article jumping back into the normal search results – this month maybe? To help coax this into happening I’m backlinking the article a little more, trying to index more of the older links, and promoting some of the other links which are a little higher in quality in my opinion. We’ll see how it goes.

Because my main Amazon article is ranking poorly right now my overall Amazon earnings this month dropped but my Adsense earnings overall made up for the drop. Some of the earnings were a result of new articles added in the last two weeks of the month and my overall earnings pace (at least for Adsense) was remarkably similar for the second half of the month compared to the first half. The first half of the month I was earning $15.01 a day on Adsense and the second half of the month I made an average of $15.71 per day.

As I mentioned earlier many of my publications this month were promoting my new niche site and that site did nicely. If you are interested in reading more on that I go into more detail on that site on my blog. I also added five or six articles to another IB account here which also earned around $6 for me this month. All in all many of my publications were designed to promote other things but they all made some money on their own.

How do I do this? I go for long tail keywords centered around product related terms. I also write a group of articles on the same or very similar topics and interlink them all together. I then backlink my IB articles usually on at least SheToldMe and InfoPirate, PostRunner, or other blogs. It doesn’t take much if the keywords are long tail enough and you have multiple articles on the topic.

Don’t just write an article on “which area rug should I buy”, write 10 articles on “which area rug pad for hardwood floor should I buy” or “is area rug pudding necessary” or “why thick area rug padding is worth buying”. Things like that – narrow your topic down.

Seriously though, you have to backlink your articles. You have to do some off-site backlinking and some on-site backlinks. That’s why you need to write your articles in groups so that you can send some good internal links at all your articles. And when you backlink them off site do it from pages that are substantially using the same title. And when you publish your article make sure you use a lot of terms throughout your articles which are valid search strings themselves. And when you publish make sure you add an H2 tag in the middle of your article which includes a good related keyword. And when you publish make sure you use very topical and long-tail keywords as your tags.

So How Did I Do? I made good money. I didn’t make more here in March than I did the month prior in February but most of this is because my best earning IB article got a lot less page views than the month prior. This wasn’t due to the Panda Update either, just due to a product fad fading. My backlinks from other sites to IB also helped me make good money on those other sites as well as here on IB… and here on IB my CTR and eCPM stayed very consistent MOM; overall things were very solid.

In March 2011 on InfoBarrel alone and on the backing of 337 non-charity articles I made:

Adsense: $488.45 (+6.6 percent MOM)

Chitika: $73.39 (-2.4 percent MOM)

Amazon: $53.22 (-38.1 percent MOM)

Total: $615.28 (-0.7 percent MOM)

Overall this was good and I’m very happy. I do wish my earnings per article would improve but many of my early articles are very poor earners. I’m talking most of my articles pre-dating July 2010 which were written strictly for backlinks and with little regard to their earning potential. Wish I could take those back.

I also wish I could made some more headway into Chitika, this seems to be the one area that was affected by IB’s layout change in February as my impressions continue to increase but earnings have dropped consistently since the layout change. Not to worry though as this is not a priority but merely a supplemental income next to Adsense and Amazon and another affiliate network which I swear I’m going to incorporate into IB earnings this month. Gotta get to that.

When looking at my entire network across the board my earnings were as good as they’ve ever been, although slightly less than Feb as one of my personal websites declined in revenue MOM significantly. I am now looking to make more online than at my day job sometime later this year – I look forward to that and I truly hope you get there sometime soon too – I know it’s possible. Luckily my wife is in wonderment at what I’m doing on the interwebs so I’ve got her approval and support. :) Good luck all.

If you haven’t seen it you are always welcome to take a look at my master InfoBarrel Income Report which provides a brief summary of all my months here on InfoBarrel. My Income report on my Diabetic Shoes niche blog can also be found on my blog if you are interested in seeing that as well. I also have more articles written on how to use InfoBarrel better which can be found on my profile page… and if you haven’t yet tried InfoBarrel I suggest you do so today. Use InfoBarrel to make your main online income or use it to support your other projects. This site is versatile – make use of it.

Comments

Wow, chezfat! I'm sure you noticed the hit but from a newbie, this looks really good. Now that I'm a month old, I'm really going to hit it hard and see what I can learn from you oldies but apparently goodies!! (and I'm not referring to age!). Thanks for sharing!!

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Hit it hard but go about it intelligently. One article done well from the get go is better than 10 articles poorly planned. I know this can be done so get to it. :) I look forward to hearing of your successes too.

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The dollar figures for Adsense, Amazon, and Chitika referenced above are for InfoBarrel only - I make a lot more when I add all the other sites I own and contribute to but I choose not to include those totals on my income reports.

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It's amazing what you have accomplished here.
I wondered if you could share your thoughts on the change in strategy you used around 7 months ago? Looking at your reports your account was basically making next to nothing for the first 10 months, then in Sept 2010 the revenue jumped dramatically to $222, and kept rising every month since then. The interesting thing though is the income against views.
For example, your March articles pulled in a relatively low 428 views against a very impressive $615 income. It would seem clear that the income is coming from historical articles? Looking therefore at the article history, of the 327 articles, only 2 have achieved more than 3,000 views.
When views is everything when it comes to revenue, can it be that your income is largely down to 2 out of your 327 articles?
Or is it a high conversion rate on the low view articles due to targetted product linking?
Many thanks for any insight you can give on this strategy.

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Sure thing, most of my articles posted up to July 2010 were not very well keyword targeted and I didn 19t do any link building to them. I posted them mainly to backlink other articles around the web and those articles were generally not the easiest keywords to rank well for either. I used very broad keywords on my IB articles thus they just didn 19t rank very well nor were the ads very good for them.
Around the first of August 2010 I started targeting good keywords which were very targeted to products or advertisers. I also started targeting long-tail keywords and started interlinking articles and backlinking. Most of my articles since August 2010 get low traffic and get high conversions because of the words they target and the obvious connection they have to advertisers and reader.
In September 2010 I started increasing the volume of publications and virtually everything I published was meant to make money directly rather than meant to backlink other articles. I used keyword selection tools provided by my Keyword Academy membership so they were generally easier to rank for. Since late Fall I 19ve been switching back to promoting other sites but I 19m still building a library here 13 I 19m just publishing here a lot smarter than I was before summer 2010.
On my articles actually published in March I made roughly $12 - and you are right, I didn 19t have more than 400 page views or so on those articles. You should also know that most every article I published in March I published after the 22nd of March 13 if you know what you are doing then you can make money right away. It just has to do with high conversion rates and targeting long-tail keywords.
In fact of all my IB articles I only have one that makes more than $20 a month and my top five articles combined only account for about 20 percent of all my income on IB. I have roughly 100 articles on IB earning more than a $1 a month. You don 19t need volume of visitors to do well just need to reach targeted traffic who will convert.
If I wanted to I could probably publish 100 articles in a month which would earn $100 all by themselves the same month. I did something close to that in September 2010 and could duplicate it if I wanted to put in the effort again. To put the effort in however I would have to sacrifice other projects I work on outside of IB and thus far I just haven 19t done that. Good questions though.

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Thanks for the detailed reply! I'm at the research stage right now, well have been for 2 months, researching all the potential avenues for IM.
What seems to be working for you is product based niche articles with around 500 (or less) global monthly exact searches, making micro income from many articles. I see you are using Keyword Academy for niche selection, I'm trying to start up with as little outlay as possible so I'll be doing my own keyword research, but a tool like that must save a lot of time.
I was going to follow that strategy, but on my own domains with good onsite on offsite SEO. The advantage of your method here at IB is that you don't need to buy any domains or hosting, the downside is that you give away 30%(?) of your earnings to IB.
Thanks again.

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Google has really made it easy to find these long-tail low search traffic keywords with the drop-down box in regular search. You really don't even need any paid tools for keyword research if you go for the low search volume stuff.
Go to Google and type anything in - lets say "pillow cover" and Google suggests things like "pillow cover zipper", "pillow cover pattern", "pillow cover fabric", and others. Then you choose one of those and you get ever more targeted stuff like "pillow cover zipper piping" or "pillow cover fabric painting" or many others. Just pick a topic like "pillow covers" and then choose 10-20 long-tail keywords suggested by Google and write n them all. Then link them all together contextually. Every article should link to 3-7 of the other articles and the next month they all should be making more than $1 a month on average on low search volume.
If you want to go after the shorter term "pillow covers" however you will have to backlink significantly which is where the TKA membership comes in real handy.
Also, with IB I give up about 15-20 percent of my income to them in return for use of their platform. This is why I also have my own sites. I don't only rely on one site for my income. Good luck.

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I am a little more than a month in and have written 45 articles and only made $1.13. I have not tried your tips on linking that much and writing about the same topic in such a variety of ways, but it seems to really be working for you. Thanks a whole bunch. I am going to try this. It is hard to swallow that you posted articles after March 22nd and still made $12 on them. How much would you say you are backlinking outside of IB and if you only have a few other personal sites that are not ranked high, do you think that matters?

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hey onenewvoice, interlinking of articles helps a ton, definitely give it a try. The same articles that I published in late March all earned me at least $15 during April - that's only Adsense but you have to remember my profile page has some authority and it links to everything I publish automatically. I have also got my article feed setup through Feedage which also links automatically to everything I publish so that helps too. Aside from that most of my late March articles have 1-3 backlinks a piece from dofollow bookmarking sites like InfoPirate and SheToldMe. These are articles to support my main blog however so I probably won't be backlinking them much beyond that although I could give them each around 20 backlinks to see how that helps. I'm not sure I understand your last question but I say it's always good to have some of your own sites to work on. They will rank higher in time if you constantly build content for them and promote them from place like IB.

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You are welcome! :) I've been off my game the last month or so with things going on in my personal life (read birth of child) but I'm starting to get back into the swing of things here. Hope your time here is going well!

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Man, you're killing it! Thank you for writing all the helpful articles about how to monetize your InfoBarrel articles. Also, thanks for sharing your residual income through InfoBarrel - very motivating.

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I wish I was still killing it :P The last couple months my income has been down but I'm working on building it back up - thanks for the cheers though and I hope my stories help motivate. Good luck Greg!